I am teaching Monkey
Monkey Archive Forums/Digital Discussion/I am teaching Monkey
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| I've been contracted by the ICE (Institut Català d'Educació) to teach some teachers how to face multiplatform games development easily. I'll be talking about Java, Objective-C, Haxe and Monkey, and I plan to do all works and samples in pure Monkey. If it works, they will teach Monkey to their students. I guess that's a good thing. I just wanted to share. |
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| I'll be talking about Java, Objective-C, Haxe and Monkey, Don't forget C/C++. |
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| Don't forget C/C++. It's a short training course, so I'll have to choose. Most of the people there do already know C and C++, they'll be mostly old-school coders. so I'll focus more in creating something appealing and easy so they can use it in their classes. The audience will be school teachers, not university teachers, so I think I should teach something easy they can use at class |
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| how to face multiplatform games development easily. vs Objective-C Is it joke? |
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| Good stuff, maybe BRL (they still called BRL?) can offer a discount for the students? |
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| Is it joke? No. just need to show what gap does Monkey fill. |
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| Congrats Adam, it should be good for Monkey in general. |
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| No. just need to show what gap does Monkey fill. That's a great way to show why monkey should be considered a viable option. Apple does it with their products all the time :) |
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| Congrats Adam, it should be good for Monkey in general. Who's Adam? (just curious) |
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| Whoops, sorry Ziggy(dyslexia strikes again), congrats to you and the best of luck with your course. :) |
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| I think this is great. A good way to spread the Monkey-X religion exponentially! |
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| the course was open for inscription on monday morning. monday evening it was sold out, so I think I'll do another one on summer. I'll be starting next week, any suggestion on how to introduce Monkey or anything you think is important to tell to a Monkey newcomer? I hope the course goes well so more people sees the beneffits of Monkey as a language. |
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| I'll be starting next week, any suggestion on how to introduce Monkey or anything you think is important to tell to a Monkey newcomer? Introducing Monkey could be a bit of a tough one. Hmmm... I would talk about the other languages first that you list previously and the common platforms that they are usually used for. But you more than likely will have to introduce C/C++, C# and Action Script as these do go hand in hand with Monkey. Then introduce Monkey as maybe a high/intermediate level language with similar characteristics to C#/Java with BASIC like syntax that uses the concept of write-once, compile to many and list the current targets along with an explanation of how Monkey accomplishes this. One thing that is important to tell a Monkey newcomer is that to compile to the available targets, the Monkey language had to be generalised to work across all available targets and that some knowledge of those previous languages, the target devices, the development kits and back-end compilers are a must to be able to implement those features that are not in the default Monkey modules and are only available to those specific targets. Edit: You should also tell them about the forum community's helpfulness. |
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| How to "pitch" Monkey depends on the audience. If you're talking to "mostly old-school coders" who are C/C++ proficient then the point to hit up-front is the ease of multi-platform and the bit to hide away is the BASIC syntax. A demo of building to web, desktop and mobile will make them less likely to shut down at the sight of Monkey's For loop construction. However, you're saying that these people are school teachers (C/C++ proficient school teachers? Really?) and this is about learning something to use in their teaching. Their actual needs should surely be aligned to that: ease of install/use/maintenance, cost, student interest, curriculum requirements etc. You should maybe email attendees before hand and ask them what their concerns are. |
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| How is the class going, can you post some of the monkey examples and/or an outline of the class? It would be interesting to see how you do it. All the best of luck. |
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| I've done just the first class and it was mostly instroductory. I used a presentation to talk about how monkey compiles to other targets, and just gave a brief explanation of some Monkey syntax details. All the material is written in Catalonian, so I'm not sure you want to read it. XD But all in all, I did see a lot of interest in the students. They also asked us to make a regular multi-device app that is not a game, so we'll use Xamarin for this instead. Now I need to propose a simple 2D game development and I'm not sure what to do. Maybe an asteroids clone, or a arkanoid clone, or something similar. Does any of you have a complete graphics/sound set that could be use with educational purposes, for free, to cover any of this game styles? That would be much more than welcome |
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| This should help you out: http://kenney.nl/assets |
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| There's good old http://www.widgetworx.com/spritelib/ |
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| Thanks for the resources! |
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| For sound effects have a look at https://www.freesound.org |
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| Thanks people! Carol, my partner at LemonBytes, has made a blog post at our site about the first class The photos are not very good, but I'm getting lots of interest in regard Monkey http://www.lemonbytes.com/first-day-at-ice-apps-and-games-development-course/ (I can't help myself smiling when I see the reference to ludum dare in the whiteboard) |
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| very interesting. are most people acceptable to Monkey, even though other language like Java are more popular? I was thinking of teaching a class here in Silicon Valley, but i wonder if most people here are set in their ways. |
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| My experience when talking to professional coders about Monkey has been that they seem interested and think it is cool but then never look at it seriously. I really think classes like Ziggy is doing are great. Maybe I should do something like that locally. |
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| well, they really like monkey. I'm "selling" it to them as a good cross platform language to make casual games. That's what it is. I also show them how it can be used to teach good coding practicles, how it resembles lots of other languages, so it can be useful for them as teachers to use it at class to teach programming. Sort of what people of my generation used Pascal for. This is a good presentation for them, as it fills their needs. In the other hand, Monkey can be used professionally for development of 2D games or apps, so it's not waisted learning. I'm sure that if I did not make some samples with the students, so they can get their hands dirty and see how good Monkey is, they would have never passed the "it's a cool idea" status. They are surprised how fast is it and how high level it is at the same time. I can understand their surprise as they've never used any BRL language before. On the paper Monkey can seem too good to be true. Then you use it, and you see it actually is as good as it seems (except, maybe, for the compilation time sometimes). |
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| i remember my first university classes, we had to learn modula-2 (1996)! wish i had the chance to learn something like Monkey :) good done ziggy, and felicitats (stands for congratulations, for not native catalan speakers)! it's good to know that at least we are 2 Monkey coders in town! |
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| I think we're the two catalans here. Glad to see you, and interesting projects in iamyellow. If we make a Barcelona Monkey coders meeting, I guess there will be you and me in the best possible scenario, but hope to see this grow! |
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